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Or with your life.
I pocket my phone and turn around. “Looks like we got a runner.”
“Angus? I didn’t take him for that kind of guy. Always seemed like an honest man,” Pasha says, sounding disappointed.
I shrug. “I don’t see what else it could be, but we’ll give him some time. Let’s grab some drinks, cool down, and then we’ll hit the road. We can come back in a couple of days.”
“But they’re closed,” Greg innocently points out.
I toss my cigarette on the ground and fling my elbow back into the glass window on the door, shattering it into the building. Reaching through the shards, I find the lock and turn it. Easy.
The door swings open and I gesture inside. “It’s self-serve tonight, boys.”
Pasha joins me as Greg climbs off his bike. Nobody is going to tolerate another two hours riding through the desert without a couple drinks in their blood. At the very least, we need to cool down. I know Angus has a shower in the back. He practically lives here.
Plus, I’d like to take a look around. I doubt Angus would be hiding out here, but it’s worth taking a look to see I he left any evidence as to where he could be. You can tell a lot about a man’s intentions by searching his belongings.
Stepping inside, the first thing I notice is the heat. Normally, Angus would have the A/C blasting, even when he wasn’t open. If you leave it off, you’re surrendering to the desert heat, and that will spoil your booze withing just a few short days.
I make my way behind the bar and notice the condensation in some of the bottles. That’s not good.
I flip open the ice box behind the bar and frown when I see that it’s been reduced to water. Dipping my pinky in, I find it to be warm. Someone cut the power, and they haven’t been here for at least a week. An insulated ice box wouldn’t melt that fast.
“Check the office before you drink anything,” I bark at Pasha as he pops open a bottle of whiskey. “Something’s not right here.”
Pasha takes a swig before trudging away to the back where Angus’s office is located. Angus likes to sleep back there, and if there’s any evidence to be gathered, it’ll most likely be in the office.
I sweep the rest of the bar while Greg joins Pasha in the back, opening the register and finding receipts from two weeks ago inside. There’s a bit of cash, as though Angus stopped working midday and just vanished.
“What are you up to?” I mumble.
The fridge below the bar is off just like the ice box, and inside, the fruit inside is fuzzy with mold. There’s no hum of electricity coming from it, no light inside, and no indication that anyone has been here in a long time.
But why? Did something happen to Smoke, Steel, & Whiskey that would cause it to fail, striking fear in Angus and causing him to flee before I could confront him about missing payments? He’s wrong if he thinks he can run from me.
“Hey, boss,” Pasha says, coming out from the back and pointing over his shoulder. “You’re going to want to see this.”
I close the fridge and move out from behind the bar, following Pasha down the hallway to the back office where Angus hangs out when the bar is closed. The lights are off, but enough light streams through the splotchy yellow windows to illuminate the hallway.
It smells like mold, and not the kind that was growing on the lemons in the fridge. It’s black mold, which is rare out here due to the lack of humidity. I used to see it when I first moved to the United States from Russian, and I was living with a group of immigrants in a basement that we rented with what little cash we could pool together.
Pasha was there with me, but not Greg. He came along later when our criminal organization took hold in Nevada, and we needed more people to keep things running smoothly.
They say crime doesn’t pay, but it’s made me a rich man.
When we arrive at the office, I stop, wrinkling my nose at the smell. It’s all too familiar, bringing me back to the nights when we would huddle around the fan in the basement, trying to trick ourselves into thinking it could make the air taste better. I’m pretty sure the mold was worse for me than smoking.
“It’s like a swamp in here,” Greg says, shaking his head.
I look around, and I’m inclined to agree. There’s a window in the office with the blinds up, hot desert sunlight streaming in with a rich yellow glow. It cascades across a desk with wilted blue plastic bags on it, once filled with ice, but now melted down and soaked into the carpet.
The door must have been closed this entire time, because it locked the moister in, causing black mold to make its home on the lower part of the walls. Angus just dropped everything he was doing and left without explanation.
The carpet squishes when I take a step into the room. I start pulling open drawers, searching through Angus’s belongings for nothing in particular. I already know that he’s gone. There’s not much left to see here. He didn’t leave a note, not even a message on my phone.
He’s just gone.
3
